the seeds of his freedom with the diligence of Luther Burbank, but it took the blood of a massacre to fertilize the field.
Sheriff Tommy called in every favor owed him. Warden Gates wired the governor and by breakfast they'd hammered out the deal: On a
At eight that morning, the guards unlocked Frank's cell; one carried his buckskin jacket like a piece of the true cross. By nine, Frank arrived at the shanty camp ready to play the savior and was met by the sorriest excuse for a posse working the sloppiest crime scene he'd ever come across.
Bodies, limbs, and heads of the victims had been jumbled like jigsaw pieces; every key witness was lost, exhausted, or hysterical; the muddy ground had been slogged into a quagmire. Frank's spirits, which had flown high as the warden explained their arrangement, settled around sea level. Five years in prison and he suddenly felt his age: Forty was old out here, and a new breed was taking over the West, stiffs like these, businessmen, desk jockeys. One of the last bona fide shooters, John Wesley Hardin, had been gunned down in El Paso in August, plugged in the back. Buckskin felt a real loss when he heard that news: For all their petty thievery and bullshit, the Earps, John Wesley, and Frank had been birds of a feather. One good look at this bunch and he knew those days were gone for good.
Frank walked the perimeter, followed by this pack of sap-heads; he found one faint set of tracks, a man moving at a dead run toward the swing bridge heading east over the Colorado. While the posse waited breathlessly behind him, he rolled a smoke, stood on the bridge, and asked himself: Where would he go if he'd done a crime like this?
Mexico, less than five miles downriver from where he was standing.
Then he had to ask himself a harder one: If one man armed only with a sword could slice his way. through a whole gang of seasoned railroad bulls like a stand of green saplings, how could he and this roundup of candy-ass amateurs ever 'bring him to ground?
Two pleasant thoughts occurred to Frank at once: These knuckle draggers had no idea what their killer looked like except he was a Chinaman, and no white man he'd ever met could tell one of them from the other. Which meant as soon as he had a reasonable suspect in sight, he could drop the son of a bitch with a buffalo gun from a hundred yards and no one would be the wiser. Fuck this sword stuff.
He lit his cigarette.
The other thing was, if it all turned to shit, before this bunch ever caught up with him he could probably make it to Mexico himself.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
As Frank stood smoking on the bridge, Kanazuchi slipped out of a boxcar in the morning freight arriving at the Phoenix yards. He made his way cautiously along the tracks between trains, alert to dangers resulting from his escape. The fight was regrettable but capture was not acceptable. Reviewing his behavior in light of the circumstances, no other action had been practical. He willed the matter out of his mind; further examination would cause unnecessary distraction. His brothers had chosen him for this mission because of his fierce dedication to mastery of
Tired, half-starved, and thousands of miles from home, he reminded himself those perceptions were illusions resulting from an over identification with the concerns of the small self. That was not the Way, either. The future depended on him; if the missing Book was not returned, their monastery would weaken and die like a tree cut from its roots. The Way would fail. Thoughts of failure would only lead to failure.
The early morning air carried the promise of heat; the ground flat and dusty, alien to him. As Kanazuchi drew within a hundred paces of the terminal, he heard voices approaching; he rolled beneath a car and hung from its undercarriage, tucking himself out of sight like a spider. Footsteps of a dozen men passed within ten feet of his hiding place; loud and purposeful, slamming open doors, examining the cars of the freight he had traveled on. He sent himself into their minds, felt tension and fear turned around into assertive, self-protective violence.
Word had been sent ahead along the singing wires and they are looking for me, he realized: One of the men had said the word 'Chinaman.'
After they passed, Kanazuchi lowered himself to the ground, pulled out his knife, and with one stroke sliced off his queue. He buried the hair under a rail tie: time for the 'Chinaman' to vanish.
Crawling out, he continued toward the station, inching his way behind a long stack of cotton bales. Kanazuchi observed the bustling terminal; looking past the crowd of passengers, he could see the offices of the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railroad, his original objective. But his plan would have to be delayed indefinitely until this pursuit quieted and he could assemble a new identity.
Fifty paces to his right, workers were unloading large canvas-draped cargo from a boxcar onto rolling sleds, which they hauled to a smaller train on a nearby track. A tall, fat man in a feathered hat strutted around, puffed up and busy as a rooster, pointing this way and that, squawking in a loud, empty voice, but the workers weren't even listening to him.
A steamer trunk tumbled off one of the sleds and opened on impact, spilling out its contents: packed layers of men's and women's clothes, heavy brocaded cloaks, clusters of shoes. The man in the feathered hat stood up on his toes and hectored the worker unmercifully; the worker ignored him and casually heaped the garments back into the trunk. The man in the hat pulled them back out and threw them on the ground again, demanding the worker fold the clothes properly before repacking them.
'Hey.'
Kanazuchi wheeled to his left; a man had walked in behind him, standing six feet away. He wore a blue uniform and hat and a badge on the breast of his tunic. They stared at one another for a long moment—then Kanazuchi saw a look of fear cross the man's coarse features; before he could react, the man raised a whistle to his lips and blew one shrill, piercing note. He was reaching with his other hand for a gun holstered at his waist when Kanazuchi broke his neck and dragged the body down behind the bales.
Maybe no one has seen this, he thought.
No: Two men wearing the same blue uniform had heard the whistle and were moving out of the station; passengers on the platform pointing in the direction of the bales. Both men blew their own whistles, pulled their guns, and ran toward where Kanazuchi crouched over the dead guard.
A bullet smacked the cotton near his head with a dry splat; to the left Kanazuchi saw a third guard, pistol in hand, sprinting toward him down the tracks.
Throughout the night, between her own bouts of fitful dreaming, Eileen laid her head back and studied Jacob Stern while he slept, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth behind their papery lids, forehead furrowed, lips twitching, small sounds of distress occasionally accompanying his shallow exhales. She didn't wake him, but the incongruity of the sight disturbed her; he seemed much more troubled asleep than awake.
A slant of morning sun touched her face, and coming out of a dream, she realized the rocking of the car had ceased. She opened her eyes and was welcomed by Jacob's warm smile and twinkling eyes watching her benignly.
'Are we here?' she asked.
'Wherever we are, we seem to have arrived,' he said.
'Rise and shine! Rise and shine, friends!' Bendigo Rymer strode down the car, rousing the weary Players to groaning protest. 'Like the mystical phoenix, whose name graces this fair city, we must arise from the ashes of our deathlike slumber and re-create ourselves in the image of a new day!'
'Piss off,' somebody muttered.
